Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2012 Symposium (2013) / Chapter Skim
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Offsetting Climate Change by Engineering Air Pollution to Brighten Clouds--Lynn M. Russell
Offsetting Climate Change by Engineering Air Pollution to Brighten Clouds--Lynn M. Russell
Pages 19-28
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From page 19... ...
However, socioeconomic questions about climate engineering remain -- such as the possibility that, if implemented, sudden cessation of enhanced particle emissions could exacerbate the climate effects on ecosystems and might interfere with oceanic and terrestrial ecosystem processes -- thus requiring cautious and comprehensive research.
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From page 20... ...
The real challenge in engineering aerosol particles to offset climate change by brightening clouds is predicting how the earth system, and in particular its clouds, will affect the albedo response to increased particles. RECENT MODEL SIMULATIONS OF CLOUD BRIGHTENING Model simulations have established the climate impacts of distributing enough particles to modify enough clouds to offset sufficient global warming to delay or lessen some of the effects expected in Earth's changing climate (Latham 1990, 2002; Latham et al.
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From page 21... ...
, along with the key scientists who made seminal contributions in each area. The Stefan-Boltzmann is constant s, Earth's albedo is a, the global mean surface temperature (approximating Earth as a black body)
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From page 22... ...
. Although there has been significant progress with both observations and models, and the qualitative aspects of the indirect effects of aerosols on clouds are well known, the quantitative representation of these processes is nontrivial and limits the ability to represent them in global climate models.
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From page 23... ...
NEW EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE OF CLOUD BRIGHTENING To learn more about the cloud physical processes that affect aerosol-cloudradiation interactions, we designed E-PEACE 2011 as a targeted aircraft campaign with embedded modeling studies, using the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) Twin Otter aircraft and the R/V Point Sur in July 2011 off the coast of Monterey, California, with a full payload of instruments to measure particle and cloud number, mass, composition, and water uptake distributions (Russell et al.
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From page 24... ...
The organic smoke particles not only activated to cloud droplets but also did so in sufficient numbers to form a track with a detectable increase in brightness. However, there was a range of brightening observed for the many different tracks formed by particle emissions from fairly similar cargo ships (Chen et al.
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From page 25... ...
The presence of low cloud layers overlying the layers affected by the smoke particles resulted in a low frequency of track formation. This finding is significant because it shows the need for representing small-scale cloud structure in global climate models in order to improve predictions of aerosol-induced cloud albedo changes.
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From page 26... ...
GOING FORWARD The seriousness of the consequences of global warming merits research into the possibility of using cloud brightening for climate engineering. However, while cloud brightening will target atmospheric emissions outside of national boundaries (since offshore marine stratocumulus have some of the largest impact on albedo)
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From page 27... ...
2008. Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming.
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